Page 23 of Shadowlands Omega

“…in the hunter’s lodge you’d have found provisions, yet she may still be undernourished.”Undernourished. Provisions. I fed her nothing. I gave her no water. “Most Omegas tend to suffer from poor nutrition after a heat, especially when serviced by a single Alpha and not a pack. Dehydration, as well.” Dehydration.

He’s a dozen steps away from me now and reaches up to scratch his throat. But he dares to meet my eyes. “Were you able to feed her at all or did the rains interfere? I’m assuming you were able to give her water, given the abundance.” He tries a smile, which illuminates his youthful face, but I’ve begun to panic. I stop where I am and lay the Omega down on the thick black fur at my feet. My beastly claws scratch at my chest, morphing back into nails. My beast is retreating on whimpers I can hear in my skull, but that do not rise in my throat. My two legs feel suddenly inadequate. I’m shaking. My heart beats erratically.

“I offered her neither food nor water. Her heat came on strong and I was lost to it.”

Radmilla, somewhere nearby, gasps. I want to claw out her esophagus to keep her from making such a sound again. It fills me with so great a shame I have not the emotional depth to process it. She has been more of a mother to me than my own mother ever was. To hear her disappointment now would have crushed me, if I were not already crushed by the sight of the Omega in my grasp.

“You…” Okayo starts, sounding flabbergasted for a moment before he straightens and points with authority. “Get her on the bed unless you’d like to bond her here.”

I would like to bond her here and it is not a sense of duty that stops me from it, but a memory of a story that was told to me once by the Berserker of Dark City. My heart is hammering. Venom drips into my mouth from fangs that have yet to fully retract. I look at Okayo, mud and sticks whipping off of my hair and splattering his skin as he crouches beside her and looks down at her body with worry and anger.

“What if it does not work?”

His neck snaps up. The three beings in the room besides the Omega and me go so still it feels as if they’ve been frozen by time. Then a cool breeze filters up from the stairwell below and through the open door. “I…” Okayo begins. His mouth opens and closes several times.

Radmilla comes to his rescue, shuffling further into the room, pink high in her otherwise pale cheeks. She looks at Okayo, speaking to him directly and subsequently ignoring me. It is a foreign sensation. “What medical equipment do you need?”

That snaps him out of his trance. “Horace, you know what we need. Fetch it now. Bring Finn to help. Radmilla, we’ll need hot water, potable water, and food prepared for when the Omega wakes. Something soft and easy to chew for now.”

“Of course. In the meantime, Lord Yaron, I suggest you bathe. I’ll be in shortly with sustenance for you as well…”

“No.” I’m still seething, panic riding me hard, making me clench so violently I’m concerned I’ll splinter all of my teeth. “I’m not leaving her.”

The world goes still again, but for a shorter beat. Okayo is in motion. Horace is racing backward down the stairs and I’m carrying the Omega to the only place I can think to bring her — my bed. And as my feet trip over one another, struggling to maintain human toes as I continue to fight with my beast, I make him assurances to regain control…assurances that I am not sure how I will keep. Because all my beast wants in this moment is a guarantee that my bed will be the only place she ever sleeps.

9 | Yaron

Shadow Keep

I am not the male I was before the rains.Before the hunter’s hole. Before she asked me to do something damning — to drop to my knees and crawl. My entire world has been thrown off of its axis and I do not know who I am anymore.

I am shame.

I am need.

It’s been hours and the Omega’s vitals are scarcely improving, even though Okayo and fuckingHoraceand Finn, a medic and a male Beta, have been working tirelessly to keep her pulse steady, her lungs pumping and her temperature up. Yet, for all of their efforts, the only visible displays of their progress are the doctored wounds on her feet and hands, the smaller cuts on her lip and cheek. She’s still slipping away, a small, contented smile on her face, like she’s at peace. Like she’s perfectly fine to leave this plane of existence and that’s not going to fucking work for me. It cannot.

The males look to me. Radmilla hovers in the room, standing awkwardly some feet away from the foot of the bed. She’s uncomfortable in here, but there are places she could have chosen in the center of the wide-open space to sit. No, she’s worried. She wants to see what’s happening to the Omega, too. Tome. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

Radmilla’s fingers fumble over her lips uselessly as she prays to the old gods. Many worship the old gods, some the new, some revere animal gods, while others worship their ancestors. Like the Ubutus. I wonder if Kiandah’s ancestors are here with her now or if they abandoned her in the heart tree or even, before that — the moment that they brought the dead into their kitchens for purposes only the damned can guess at. I glance at Radmilla, hoping that for the Omega’s sake, she calls to them, too. Because if any moment calls for prayer, it is this one. We’ve exhausted other options.

“Lord Yaron, what’ll it be?” Okayo says to me.

I open my mouth to reply, but all I can think about is a memory that isn’t even mine, but that belongs to Berserker Dragnovic. He failed his Omega when he attempted to force his bond.

“My Lord, we don't have much time. What do you decide?” Finn says, out of turn and out of line. He is the lowest ranked person in this room, but I do not reprimand him for it. Not now. I look up at the room full of worried stares with one single looming worry of my own. They think I have a choice to make, but they’re wrong. I have already chosen. But I am not certain thatshehas.

“It is understandable for you to decline to bond this Omega,” Horace says softly. Fucking Horace is the last person I’d like to hear from now, especially when it comes to the topic of cutting this Omega free for another Alpha pack to ravage her and worship her and breed and bond her and take her away from me. I release a low snarl, which Horace promptly misinterprets or ignores. “No Shadow Lord has bonded an Omega in six hundred years. It is a heavy choice to make simply to spare this one, especially knowing that she and her family are criminals…”

“Is there a way to test its efficacy?” I say, ignoring Horace entirely and focusing on Okayo so that I don't do something drastic. Like bite Horace’s head clean off.

Okayo blinks at me from over the Omega’s sleeping body, looking strained, looking stunned. He has beads of sweat coalescing along his hairline. His hair is short, a shock of tight black curls and coils. His nostrils, wideset already, flare further. “You aren’t hesitating because she’s a criminal or because of tradition, are you?”

A dawning comprehension changes his face entirely, its shape rounds. He softens. He looks like he’s aged in reverse a decade or more, and he already looked young before. Now, he looks at me with all the green novelty of a boy discovering a fictitious deity was real all along. And then the smile he wears falls as he turns over my words. His brows knot. He whispers, “You don't think it will work.”

He's right. And one more drop of blood lost could be what kills her. “I wish to be certain before I tear open her throat.”As Berserker Dragnovic did once.My voice sounds far more ragged than I intended.

A look of grim determination replaces the surprise Okayo wore before. He reaches across the Omega’s body and pulls her wrist out from beneath the black blanket. “We’ll try to be direct. See if we can’t ensure that you inject your venom into her vein as directly as possible. The puncture wound you create will have to be precise and small.”

---